The Bride of Dreams

by Frederik van Eeden

"Listen, mother. I might say now: Yes! yes! I can repeat it all after you exactly and persuade myself that I feel it all too. But then I would lie. And God has made me so that I would rather not lie if I can help it. I know no reason why I should be thankful to God for afflictions or should call the bitter sweet and the ugly beautiful. If he is my creator then he is also responsible for the desires and feelings of his creature."

"What I tell you, Vico, is something you cannot understand except through the light of grace. You must be born again through faith. You reason now as all who trust to their human understanding. I can only pray that his grace will be poured out over you. And for the sake of your mother, who loves you so, you surely do not wish to shut your heart and blind yourself to the true light? You surely will want to hear what the church teaches and want to obey and accept what older and wiser people, through love, tell and advise you."

"My heart is open to every light, mother. I am willing to hear and to consider everything. But though I would ever so gladly, I cannot obey and accept unless what I am told and advised seems acceptable to me."

"May God break your self-conceit!" my mother sighed.

What I have written here is an average and collective type of many hundreds of conversations which I had with my mother during the ten years following. With the indefatigable zeal of flies incessantly buzzing up and down and striking against a window pane, we two tenacious and autocratic persons tried to thrust upon one another our own peculiar individuality. My mother with a more aggressive love, I more on the defensive, but in my self-assertion, none the less militant. Possessed by the universal conceit of the reasonableness of our feelings and convictions, neither one of us noticed that this was simply a struggle between two natures whereof one was trying to subject the other. And accustomed as almost all the human herd to the idolatry of the true word, we both imagined that by merely talking, talking we could finally make the word which we ourselves considered true the idol of our fellow-man too, like two missionaries of different faith holding up their symbol before one another until one of the two falls on his knees.

And the mother now said that it was the father's education that made me refractory, just as the father had thought to oppose the maternal influence: as though they continued the old feud about me and through me.

The four hours of anxious suspense on the capsized boat, my father's curse ringing in my ears, his grim sinking face before my eyes, had struck such a deep gash into my young and tender soul that at first I would awaken every morning from a dream, in which the whole thing was lived through again, crying for help in a voice hoarse from screaming as I had cried so long across the lonely dusky sea. Only very gradually did these evil memory dreams cease, and till late in my life they would recur whenever my power of resistance was weakened.

These dreams acted upon me like warnings, repeating the stern lesson of the terrible event. "You have repelled your father and chosen your mother's side. You have rejected his ideas and thereby driven him to death. And what if he had been right now? Are you sure that your mother deserved this sacrifice? Are you sure that your life was worth saving? What have you - really - of that life which you so desperately defended? By your defiance you have taken a heavy responsibility upon yourself. You must now seek this assurance: the assurance that your father was in the wrong and that you are doing right by continuing to live and adhering to your mother."

These were the warnings that beset me every morning when the morning light had once more dispelled the fearful vision. In vain I sounded the depths of my soul - to find whence issued these compelling and distressing thoughts. A power dwelt within me which seemed to possess a mighty voice, and a strong coercive force when I did not want to listen. And I soon observed that this power increased in proportion as I felt weaker and more discouraged. Was it the voice of the herd, which my father had taught me to despise, but which he no more than I could infallibly distinguish from his own voice? Who was this speaker, this tyrant?

There existed a bridge of heartiness and affection between my mother and myself which always remained practicable even when the flood of controversy raged highest. When it seemed as though we would never understand each other, we would simply stay the structure of our phrases and without détour approach one another through the ever open door of our love, without troubling ourselves about logic or consistency.